Moira Ricci

For the project Se il The End fosse stato tragico sarei stata più abituata alle delusioni d’amore (If The End Had Been Tragic I Would Have Been More Accustomed to Love Disappointments), Moira Ricci collects the final frame of a series of films with happy endings and reworks the happy image by transforming it into its opposite. Thus in the work in the collection taken from the finale of Flashdance we see the protagonist leave the scene in tears, while her betrothed spouse walks off with another woman.

Memories and the relationship with her mother are at the heart of the series 20.12.53-10.08.04, in which Moira Ricci appropriates photos from the family album, manipulating them using Photoshop to insert her own portrait alongside that of her mother, who died at the age of 50 in 2004. The artist camouflages herself in the photos by wearing clothes and hairstyles that follow the fashion of the time. One detail betrays the staging: the artist’s gaze is never turned towards the camera, but always rests on her mother, as if to protect her and warn her of the danger she is in.

MOIRA RICCI is an artist who depicts personal and collective memories. In her projects she puts on stage her body, her relationship with people and the stories of the place she comes from. In the work 20.12.53-10.08-04 (2009), she brings together intimate personal history with a gaze on the past through the re-working of photographs from her mother’s youth, in which the artist inserts her own self-portrait, with her gaze always directed at her mother. In recent projects she has focused on her place of origin in the Maremma: Dove il cielo è più vicino (2014), a cycle of photographs and two video-projections in which history and fable intersect in the realism of the framing and the inspiration of the artist; Da buio a buio (2009-15) is a project about the myths and folklore of the Maremma, a hybrid installation made up of newspaper cut-outs, video recordings, soundtracks and photographs from family archives. *She was born in Orbetello in 1977, she lives and works in Milan and the Maremma.